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Databases & Data

The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 105 posts.

2019
33

PostgreSQL at low level: stay curious

Yes, I know, it’s a long text, and it was my conscious decision to write it in this way. But fear not! Imagine that you read a book, take a look at the introduction and first few interesting sections, think about it and then find time to read further. I hope I’ve left enough references, so if you don’t get some ideas…

36

To ORM or Not to ORM

I've been enjoying using Go's database/sql package for working with databases. Recently, some mentions of gorm piqued my curiosity about using ORMs in Go vs. using database/sql directly. Having had some mixed experiences with ORMs in the past, I decided to start with a practical experiment by writing the same simple…

42

A Tale of Query Optimization

Last December, I got an interesting bug report from the VWO support team. It seemed like the loading time of a particular analytics report was ridiculously slow for a big Enterprise customer. Since I am part of the Data platform, a flag was immediately raised and I got involved in debugging the issue.

45

Comprehensive Guide on Data Visualization with Pandas

Visualization has always been challenging task but with the advent of dataframe plot() function it is quite easy to create decent looking plots with your dataframe, The **plot** method on Series and DataFrame is just a simple wrapper around Matplotlib plt.plot() and you really don’t have to write those long matplotlib…

48

On Sharding

If you need to handle really a lot of traffic, there’s only one way to do it: sharding. Which is to say, splitting up the incoming requests among as many hosts (or Lambda functions, or message brokers, or data streams) as you need. Once you get this working you can handle an essentially unlimited request volume. Of…

50

Introduction to Datalog

In contrast to the imperative programming paradigm, declarative programming expresses the logic of a computation without explicitly specifying its control flow. That is, declarative programming focuses on the what , not the how . If you have tentatively researched declarative programming before, you have likely read…

54

Interpretable Machine Learning

Machine learning is part of our products, processes, and research. But computers usually don’t explain their predictions , which can cause many problems, ranging from trust issues to undetected bugs. This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable.